These are my links for December 25th through December 27th:

• 2009 As Seen Through Twitter Hashtags – You may have seen Twitter’s recently announced most discussed topics of ‘09. The list really highlights the gravity of this important year: A new US President was sworn into office, celebrities died and celebrities were born, there were revolutions, there were pandemics, and technology continued its rapid advance.
• The Top Ten IPO Candidates For 2010 – Below is our list of the top ten IPO candidates for 2010 in the technology industry (and, no, it doesn’t include Twitter).
• 64% Prefer Old Twitter Retweets to New Style – We mixed up our weekly Web Faceoff series a bit this time, with a novel head-to-head battle between Twitter’s old and new style of retweets. In the previous 3-way matchup we saw Digg beat out Reddit and StumbleUpon for social news supremacy, and this week we saw another heated battle come to a close with perhaps a surprising winner.
• Drunk Drivers in Texas to Be Named on Twitter – Drunk driving in Montgomery County, Texas, this holiday season? Expect to see your name in Tweets, as the local district attorney’s office has vowed to name and shame drunk drivers on Twitter.
• Foursquare vs. Gowalla: Location-Based Throwdown – Just when you thought you had enough social networks in your life, two hot new ones are vying for your attention. Combine the benefits of sites like Yelp, Twitter, and Google Latitude, add in social gaming and some privacy measures, and you have the recipe that Foursquare, the app that’s been called “next year’s Twitter,” by Mashable’s own Pete Cashmore, and its chief competitor, Gowalla, are cooking. Each has attracted a rapidly growing user base in 2009, and each is rushing madly to beat the other to your smartphone in 2010.

This is the Daily Link Report for September 10th

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• TweetMixx: A Better Way to Track Twitter Trends and Topics – New web service TweetMixx is a bit like TweetMeme (Tweetmeme) meets saved Twitter searches meets a web-based Twitter client. It allows you to follow your favorite topics, not just people, and attempts to help cull the best tweets from people you don’t and may not even want to follow.
• Facebook Now Lets You Fax Your Photos. I Have No Idea Why Anyone Would Want To Do This – Now this is the dumbest feature I've ever seen.
• Facebook Open Sources FriendFeed’s Real-Time Tech – With Tornado Friendfeed and Facebook appear to have decided to keep Friendfeed alive! w00t
• Gmail Lets You Check Your Google Voice Messages – You can now listen to your Google Voice messages in Gmail! A much needed addition to Labs
• Obama Health Care Speech: What Did Twitter Think? – The Twitterverse was opinionated like usual. Very interesting graph.
• Tornado Web Server Documentation – This is a link to the Documentation for the Tornado (off shoot of Friendfeed). Very exciting.
• The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed’s web server – Bret Taylor’s blog – Today, we are open sourcing the non-blocking web server and the tools that power FriendFeed under the name Tornado Web Server. We are really excited to open source this project as a part of Facebook's open source initiative, and we hope it will be useful to others building real-time web services. Check out the announcement on the Facebook Developer Blog. You can download Tornado at tornadoweb.org.
• Facebook Tornado: FriendFeed’s Real-Time Web Framework Goes Open Source – It appears that Facebook is doing what many of us Social Media freaks had hoped. They are turning their recently acquired Friendfeed into a opensource platform called Tornado.
• Facebook @Mentions: Five Ways They Could Impact Twitter – Facebook just sent shockwaves through the social web with its announcement that they will be supporting @mentions in status updates. The feature, which Facebook calls tagging, allows you to not only reference friends, but groups, pages, and events.
• BREAKING: Facebook Lite Is Live – Now the testing seems to be done. Facebook Lite has launched

Google opened up its latest search engine update to the world yesterday. Though most of the changes are under the  hood and the basic user interface is the same, some subtle changes are occuring. One of which appears to be the the weight that social media profiles and pages rank in the SERPS.

Patricio Robles over at Econsultancy writes:

As you can see, there aren’t many noticeable changes to the UI. In fact, you probably won’t notice much difference at all. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, “this update is primarily under the hood” and has involved “rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure“.

And yes, that means that there will be some changes in site rankings. From my limited initial tests, the impact on rankings seems subtle — most of the time.

One exception appears to be social web results. For instance, certain high-profile Facebook Pages appear to be receiving a major boost in the rankings with Caffeine. One commenter on the Google Webmaster Central blog also noted “I’ve noticed more Twitter pages in the results with this version of Google“.

I decided to test this for myself. Using the sandbox I did a search for my name. Sure enough at the #2 spot was my twitter page. When I searched for my company’s name (Goldstein Meda) I noticed another change. The map results were farther down the page. And though a few random results popped in my Twitter account for my business still showed up in the results.

Though there are some subtle differences, I have yet to see anything jaw dropping. The higher ranking positions of social media profiles and pages does give more weight to having a presence on some of the more influential social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin  and YouTube.

In my opinion this is only the beginning social media’s impact on online business and SEO.

I’d love to hear what you think of these developments. Post your thoughts in the comments below.

This is the Link Report for August 8th through August 10th:

• FriendFeed Co-Founder: Facebook Acquisition Talks Began in 2007 – The details!
• SEOmoz | 4 Essential SEO Infographics – Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz.org published a great post with Info Graphics that relate to SEO
• 2009 Facebook and Twitter Growth by Age Group | Ignite Social Media – The following chart by Nielsen shows that audiences above 25 have experienced a whopping 84% growth in Twitter adoption over the past 6 months. Also interesting is the 20% growth happening within the 55+ age range, compared to the 16% increase in 2-24 year olds. This slight discrepancy in growth doesn’t mean that younger audiences aren’t interested in Twitter, but suggests that they have already adopted it. (Also, after seeing the age ranges listed on this chart, I now want to see what a two-year old would tweet.)
• Facebook Acquires FriendFeed (Updated) – Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now.At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few of features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.
• 6 Twitter Directories To Add Yourself To – Everyone is always looking for new ways to get more Twitter followers. Well, one of the best ways to do this is by getting discovered through Twitter directories. There are many out there to choose from and it’s very quick and easy to add yourself to them. So, here are a few to get you started. Feel free to share your favorite (whether listed or not) in the comments.
• What is a Natural Link Growth Profile? | SEO Book.com – 3 Common Link Building Strategies1. spiky. if the spikes are associated with news and viral marketing then that is not a big problem, but if they are sorta bought links, low quality links, etc. then this is sorta the worst way to do it.
  2. linear. not as bad as spiky…but not as good as geometric. this is where a webmaster tries to build the same number of links each month.
  3. geometric. this is where link building starts off slow, but then keeps getting better each month.
• Company Boasts it Sold Twitter Followers to Michael Jackson – With the increasing popularity of social media sites and the power of marketing on them, more and more people have been investing in services which can increase their rankings faster than they could do on their own.One such service is the highly-controversial paid Twitter follower service which has been offered by web promotions company uSocial.net for several months now. Now they’re claiming they’ve had the attention of some of the world’s largest names, including one interesting one in particular.
• Reporting SERP Spam: Know How to Report & Reclaim Your Rankings – Below is a guide about spam results, how to detect them, and finally where to report them. If you want all the links to submit a spammy site, they’re at the bottom (but if you skip all the interesting info you might not know what to look for!).
• NBA star’s Twitter ID crisis rebounds on him and the site | Technically Incorrect – CNET News – The NBA, Players and Twitter. A good mix? Debatable
• Twitter Co-Founder: Attacks Continue to Change in Nature and Intensity – Apparently, we’re not out of the woods just yet. While Twitter itself has been working reliably for most of the day, some third-party applications remain impacted by measures the company has taken to defend against DDoS attacks.

So in January, Ms. Herrscher began thinking about ways to apply the principles of Twitter to her site. She wanted something where her readers “wouldn’t have to dig through the millions of people on Twitter to find moms, or moms in their area or moms with their common interests,” she said. “It’s a smaller, manageable community.”

via A Twitter Spinoff Launches for Moms – Digits – WSJ.

So here’s the thing, all of these Twitter spin offs, Laconi.ca installations etc., are great. Yet they are missing two things, in my opinion, the community and the interconnectivity. The majority of people are on Twitter. Yes there is a following for spin off sites like Identi.ca and the TWIT Army (both of which I belong to), but the fact that Twitter has almost everyone on it and the developmental chops via the API makes it seem so much more powerful than it’s clones.

Though Rachael Herrscher might be on to something, I just feel that we’re dealing with an overload of social media sites. On a daily basis many of us are checking at least three if not more programs to follow people and get our news.

Personally these are the services that I use on a regular basis:

• Twitter (always open in Tweetdeck)
• Facebook (always open in a tap in Firefox)
• Linkedin (I jump back and forth when I get a notice or an email about something on the service)
• FriendFeed (when I’m not already overloaded)
• Google Reader (for Twitter search term feeds and blog updates)
• GMail (for my email)
• Delicious (to share sites that I find on a daily basis with the world)

Now that’s just on a daily basis and thankfully I’m still able to get my work done. Granted my business is closely tied to social media and the Internet so I’m able to suppliment my life with these services. But when is adding services causing more harm than good or even not contributing anything.

I’m also on theses sites (and I’m missing tons):

• Identi.ca ( a twitter clone network. Find me as GoldsteinMedia)
• Army.Twit.Tv (another Laconi.ca opensource Twitter clone run by Tech guru Leo Laporte of This Week In Tech and TechTV fame)

The solution, in my opinion, is not to stop innovating or making new services. The solution is to make all these clones and networks talk to each other (easily). That way people can interact on a broader scale without major time-consuming social media burnout.

I’m interested in what you think. Post your comments below.